A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

The new MMORPG game from NCsoft called Aion that is coming by the end of this month has finally entered in an open beta after some time being in a closed beta and accessible to only limited number of people. Actually the open beta is not that open, because you still need to get a hold of a beta game key and there are still quite hard to get, some gaming websites are running giveaways to their users and there are even people selling the beta keys. Anyway you should know that Aion is kind of like WoW, but providing better graphics and of course coming with a completely different story and world. The not so good thing about the game is that when you buy it you get 30 days free to play and after that a monthly fee is required to continue to play…

The good thing however is that even though there is still no profile available for the game in the 3D Vision drivers, when running it with Nvidia’s shutter glasses or even by using the 3D Vision Discover free mode with anaglyph glasses you get quite good results. With the default settings the game looks quite good in Stereoscopic 3D, but depending on how you prefer to play (first/third person) you can adjust convergence by hand for even better and more impressive results. And as with most MMORPGs Aion is not that heavy in terms of graphic requirements, although the game looks great with maximum level of detail, you should be able to run it quite well on middle-end GPUs even in S3D mode. And the not so good thing, related to the current open beta only, is that the game is a bit buggy and the servers seem to be a bit overloaded at the moment, which results in slow response time and you getting annoyed by that. I’ve prepared some screenshots that I took today in JPS format (stereo pairs) for viewing with 3D Vision / 3D Vision Discover with different settings – in terms of graphics quality and depth and convergence adjustment. You can download the screenshots that start with default graphics level and with no manual convergence adjustment, ending with absolute max of the details with 8xAA on and with custom convergence levels.